“People don’t care how much
you know until they know how much you care.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“We have met the enemy and he
is us.”
Walt Kelly (Pogo)
When you’re in the property management
business, many different things in houses will break. It’s a sad reality, but it is also the
reality that keeps property managers in business (so we keep our complaints to
a minimum!).
Contrary to popular thought in Charlotte
So how do we know if the repair
people we use are any good? The simple
answer is if things are fixed and tenants are not calling us to say their issue
did not stay resolved. And if the issue
recurs (which happens to the best of them), how does the repair person handle
it? Do we get charged for another visit
to the house? Do these recurring issues
happen often? How long does it take for
them to get back to do the repair again?
So skill-wise, we can figure out
if a repair person is any good in a reasonable amount of time. Let’s call those the hard skills. But what about the soft skills? Are they kind? Conscientious?
Do they care?
That’s tougher. We can’t go on every service call with our
repair people. And if they can’t at
least fake being nice and caring during those calls, they weren’t going to last
anyway. So how can you tell if they care?
I’ve learned 2 lessons over the
years:
1. If any tenants call to complain about a
repair person, there is probably something wrong with the repair person. Two calls and there is definitely something
wrong.
It takes time and effort to
locate the property manager’s information, call them, and detail your
experience without sounding like a whiner.
Most tenants don’t care enough unless something is really off.
Several years ago, I used a
really nice, reasonably priced handyman to work on many of our homes. When I would see him in person, he was sharp
as a tack and would bend over backward to resolve issues. But I started getting a few tenant calls
about chronic lateness and “shady” people he was bringing with him to work on
jobs. We had to sever ties with
him. He’s still a nice guy, but he just
didn’t care enough to show up on time and be professional.
2. If the repair person is treating us poorly,
chances are they are doing the same to the tenants.
Recently, we had a repair person
work on an issue at a vacant home for us.
We gave him the lockbox code so he could get in and do the work. The next day we were at the property and
found the house key in the lockbox, broken in half. We called the repair person and he said he
had broken the key in the lock and forgotten to call us about it.
To me, that’s sort of a big deal,
but not the key breaking per se. I will
be the first to tell you that things happen.
As Charles Swindoll said, “Life is 10% of what happens to me and 90% of
how I react to it.” I’m not going to
give someone a hard time over things breaking; truthfully the lock was tough
and anyone could have broken a key in it.
But not thinking it was important enough to let me know immediately
about? I have to ask, “Does he care?”
Having repair people that care
matters. Being a property manager who
cares is important too. And the two are
exactly the same to the tenants we serve.
Happy Landlording!
Brett Furniss is the head property manager of BDF Realty
(Charlotte
Residential Property Management), the trusted real estate advisor for Charlotte
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